UK Online Safety Regulations and impact on Forums

webbouk said:
Not possible
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Again, not entirely true.

Social host liability is created by a statute or case law that imposes liability on social hosts as a result of their serving alcohol to adults or minors. A social host is most often a private individual who serves alcohol in a non-commercial setting. Persons subject to social-host liability in civil actions are typically those that provided alcohol to the obviously intoxicated social guests who subsequently are involved in vehicle crashes or other activities causing death or injury to third parties, or to minors who are injured as a result of intoxication that results from service of alcohol by the host, but the circumstances under which social host liability can result varies by jurisdiction.[1][2]

Most people are aware that serving alcohol to people who are below the legal age for the consumption of alcohol is illegal in the United States. Exceptions from that prohibition for service of alcohol to minors in family settings, for religious reasons and other purposes varies by state. In some states a person who serves alcohol to a minor may potentially be held liable if the alcohol provided is found to have contributed to the commission of a crime.
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Ozzy47 said:
That's not entirely true. If the guest was at your house and got drunk or high on drugs at your house, you can be held liable for anything that happened to them after leaving. Similar to getting over served at a bar.
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This is true, but the analogy was good because we aren’t inviting users to join our websites, feeding them illegal content then watching them wander off to discover more illegal content.

We are talking about users discovering legal, none harmful content, then migrating to YouTube from an embedded video and some unknown time in the future finding videos of harmful content. There is no liability here :)
 
But you are allowing them access to your website, same as if a guest you invited brings a plus 1, you didn’t invite them, but they are still there.
 
I think basically if links on your site, lead children to other sites that are not suitable for children, you're supposed to mitigate for that. It does mention hyperlinks in the Ofcom blurb somewhere. Just as a sharing link to X wouldn't be suitable for kids to click on.

I wonder if Cbeebies web page has an option to upload videos that can be linked 🤣 Doubt it.

Even if there was a child safe site people could upload videos to share the links from that isn't really good for all the adult members. Fact is my site isn't intended for children - but for adult owners or over 13's at least. But children could be attracted to it.
 
I find the Ofcom stuff ridiculous and annoying - that says kids from age 2 upwards might have access to devices. When ours were kids, their devices were locked down to only access child appropriate sites and apps. Even the web browser was offbounds. Over 13 you can still restrict certain things with settings and passwords. It's very nannyish to the average site owner who isn't hosting "adult" content.
 
One adult site, the world's largest, claims implementing an age check which I believe they were required to do under Louisiana state law resulted in an 80% drop in traffic. They appear to have responded by blocking access at state level. It doesn't sound particularly robust but I guess it satisfies that particular age requirement.

As far as the UK and OFCOM is concerned they say they will obey the law but don't say how. It's a little concerning that even the largest of sites chooses to block access rather than implement age verification.
 
I have no evidence to back it up, but I would hope if your site is generally targeted at adults, but you are unable to prove you might not have some children using it then things like embedded YouTube - which may well lead places - is probably going to be viewed as okay as long as you've done a reasonable amount of due diligence. If however your site was aimed at children first and foremost then that kind of "escape" route would probably be frowned upon. However if Ofcom would look on it like that who knows? Going back many years now, but the question of linking out on BBC children's sites was a huge discussion when universal navigation was added across the BBC sites since the children's sites were then going to be a click away from News and photos of wars and all sorts.

I expect adult sites will just do age checking for UK IP addresses and call it a day at that, and then anyone who decides maybe they'd rather browse their adult sites more anonymously will just use a VPN (which they probably already do use). Net result very little difference in terms of "safety", probably a decent drop in traffic however which might impact the bottom line (advertising).
 
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Thanks @chillibear The site isn't intended for children - it's intended for pet owners - who are predominantly adults. However it falls under the category of "attracting" children. And the only way to know they aren't registered is to have age verification software.

Going back to videos and photos, occasionally a parent member would have their kids in the photo or video. Recommendation was not to do that but I always thought it was up to them previously.

Anyway aside from no youtube videos, no dm's, removing exif from photos, word censors and various automoderating features. Essentially I would need more moderators to comply with a child risk assessment.

Or, as suggested earlier - some kind of addon to put everything into a manual moderation queue overnight.
 
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Shufti Age ID replied saying they support 240 countries. So I'm assuming that is included in the prices quoted. So their solution does sound the best. It just means set up costs and then funding it ongoing.
 
Regarding the potential DM exposure, is there an easy way to see stats around DMs?
e.g. Who has been sending them to other members
 
I've just run a report to put DM's into some sort of perspective.
During March we averaged approx 15 new DM's a day and in the region of 53 replies per day to existing DM's.

Personally I'd say our Chatroom, especially private chats, were the highest risk as they were pretty much unmoderated, basically you would have needed someone full time to monitor real-time chats. Removing the Chatroom has negated that risk.
Monitoring DM's against keywords seems to be working and I'll see about widening the list of keywords against known words and phrases.
Not surprisingly, the only comprehensive lists out there are available at a price. You could not make it up.
 
So who else is doing a child risk assessment? While I was dead keen to resolve age verification software, I got stuck at the idea of it being offputting to people joining, having to go through a process and being charged 50p.

I'm kind of thinking more about the earlier suggestion of putting everything overnight in for manual moderation next day, unless a US member or two is willing to take on a moderator role. However the other long term issue is - what happens if I drop dead? Or become seriously ill? Obviously I can't be fined if I'm dead. But if incapacitated and couldn't hand over to someone quickly enough and things "slid" ..........

Hence logically I should just retire and leave the forum offline. But not being logical, I want to carry it on much longer.
 
TBH I think you're overthinking it and causing yourself more grief that is necessary :)

Here's my approach, not just all recent.....

Register a limited company with Companies House and make the company the owner of the hamster forum, name yourself as a director.
Liability then stops with the company, not you.

Then ensure you've carried out the risk assessment.
Remove any chatrooms if you have any as 'the company' finds them to be high risk.
Implement the add-ons by Ozzy47 detailed in posts 956 and 957 of this thread to monitor DM's
Mr Lucky

Post in thread 'UK Online Safety Regulations and impact on Forums'

webbouk said:
If this could include DM's then in effect all bases are covered.
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There's already an addon for DMs, and provided you adjust your privacy policy I believe this can work very well.

  • Like
Add the list of Keywords detailed by Mr Lucky within the add-ons.
In your permissions, set the option to not allow images in DMs to all members, ie 'Never'
The above will ensure that you've taken steps to reduce risks associated with DM's

Sit back a relax. Remember OFCOM have bigger fish to fry than a small Hamster owner's forum which has at least taken steps to mitigate risks.
 
Although OFCOM are not naming it, it's very easy to find and their frontpage confirms it's the one OFCOM are looking into.
It's running Xenforo v2.2.15, though there's no branding on the main site. It's also behind Cloudflare.
 
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